Portfolio

Imagination Movers

Tacking on a store

Mon Dec 20, 2010

The Imagination Movers home page.

The Imagination Movers are a group of guys from New Orleans inspired to create their own children’s show. It became a local hit and the Movers were eventually picked up by Disney. The band has a pretty deep catalog of material and tours pretty extensively.

Their management hired ground(ctrl) to design and build their new website, and we ended up tacking on a few extras features to make management a little easier for them.

Images

Credits

The Imagination Movers’ (IM) website is hosted on the ground(ctrl) system. Anthony Ordonez did the basic layout and design. I did the build and design of elements not lined out in the original design. I also built a custom CMS module to allow them manage products on their site from a third party store.

Features

The design of this site posed some fun CSS challenges. The header has quite a bit going on in it: a logo, band photo, gears a slideshow/media player. In the static design, the composition looked balanced and bled off the edges nicely. In a browser where we can’t predict widths, static placement doesn’t always work so well, especially when certain elements bleed and overlap. I broke out the different header elements into separate elements and positioned them independently of one another. Some of them with percentages, others fixed to containing elements. This keeps the elements evenly positioned and minimizes the overlapping of critical elements like play buttons in the media player regardless the screen width.

The ground(ctrl) platform has a fully featured store module that allows us to offer order fulfillment and inventory management for our clients. Like some of our other partners, the Imagination Movers already have an order fulfillment system that works well for them. While the shopping cart functionality of this system lives on a third party site, the catalog needs to exist on their website.

Our platform has various ways to handle custom pages, but the IM management team runs a pretty tight ship when it comes to selling merchandise, and they need robust control over what appears on their store page. Their third-party store service doesn’t offer this level of control, so I built a custom CMS that lives on a separate platform from the rest of the ground(ctrl) system. This system has a simple API that spits out product information in JSON format that the ground(ctrl) system then reads and parses into the HTML templates.

Notes

The IM audience is a little too young for the internet, so the website is targeted to parents and is a great resource for purchasing concert tickets, CDs, DVDs and more. My kids watched the show regularly when they were young. It was cool to learn more about the band and actually see just how music focused and prolific they are.